It all begins with prayer!

Trinity Western University is an academic community of people who believe in the importance of prayer and live out core beliefs by praying for students, alumni/ae, and for each other. Prayer is a powerful means of bringing peace and promise upon others. Prayer has impact and brings God into the work we aspire to do in and for the lives of our students. Prayer acknowledges that it is God who is at work and calls us into the privileged roles of being the means by which he works grace and truth into their lives.

Our students come with giftedness and strengths, aspirations, promise and potential, great questions and great longings to know and be known, but also to be loved, accepted, included, and affirmed. So many students come to university with fears and anxieties, biases and baggage, false ideas about self and the world, immaturity and poor habits. So many come wounded and worried from broken families, ineffective and sometimes toxic churches, and from high schools which mirror corrupted contexts of society. Some students come with the adrenalin of new found freedom, yet without the self-control and wisdom to know how to handle it. They come with patterns of behavior that remain anchored in adolescence, a preoccupation with self, a debilitating lack of confidence, and insecurity masked by bravado. Some come with escalating idealism wherein the failures and faux pas of others are too easily labled as hipocracy.

Then, with other students who seem grounded and at peace about their purpose in being there, they enter this covenant community, this social, intellectual, spiritual ecology of higher learning where truth is understood as both discovered and revealed, where what is real and true is understood in the context of grace, and of love lived out not merely as a feeling, but as an action, a verb. They enter a community where they are loved and prayed for by others. They enter a community where faculty, other students, and staff come along side to help them navigate the difficult waters of university life, of "Life Together" in the words of Deitrick Bonhoeffer. They find themselves immersed in a fabric of faithfulness where education is grounded in the desire that every student undergo a transformation and every student grows to be a person of positive impact on the world, where every student is respected for whom they are becoming and shall one day be. They enter a community of faith, hope, and love, real and sometimes tough love, where they can know in full and be known in full. Their entry begins before they arrive. It begins with the anticipation of a community who has already begun to pray for them before they are met and welcomed. It all begins with prayer!